Copyright pcgamer
Skip to main content Close main menu THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES View Profile Search PC Gamer PC Gaming Show Movies & TV Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine Subscription Why subscribe? Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag Try a single issue or save on a subscription Issues delivered straight to your door or device From€28.99Subscribe now PC Gaming Show Tokyo Essential Hardware Battlefield 6 Don't miss these My new bedtime Steam Deck go-to is a cozy bookshop sim where everyone loves hearing my opinion Gaming Industry 'Knowing Steam players are hoarders explains why you give Valve that 30%,' analyst tells devs: 'You get access to a bunch of drunken sailors who spend money irresponsibly' New Steam update adds new 'customise' tab your games—letting you finally organise things by release date, or just look at Big Naturals Withers every time you open Baldur's Gate 3 I've swapped modern live service games for a browser game that's been running since 2009 Steam's new store look is out and is earning a mixed response: 'Thanks Valve I am a grandma using Steam on a giant old touchscreen Samsung tablet' You probably have like $100 in Steam trading cards on all those games you've never played, and you can get it without ever actually launching them Gaming Industry With Silksong in our hands, Steam's new reigning wishlist kings are both kind of basket cases: The partially-released Deadlock and lawsuit lightning rod Subnautica 2 I'm sick to death of PC gaming's endless launchers Gaming Industry 'Patient gaming' only gets more attractive when $70 games get heavy Steam sale discounts just months after launch You don't need to wait for SteamOS to ditch Windows: I've been running Linux for the past 2 months and the revolution is already here Every game is a roguelike deckbuilder now, but I've finally found a few that have stopped me being a hater Graphics Cards Valve says Steam's performance monitor should now report GPU utilisation more accurately than Task Manager in the latest beta, and as a nerd, this pleases me in ways I can't describe Handheld Gaming PCs I'm already dreaming about the Steam Deck 2, and the upgrade at the top of my wishlist is a sleeker, lighter form factor All MMO quest journals are a massive waste of potential, except for FF14's, which was good for exactly one storyline Handheld Gaming PCs The best Steam Deck games The more book tracking apps I try, the more I think we as gamers don't realize just how good we've got it with Steam Lauren Morton 2 hours ago Steam should be the blueprint for the reading apps boom. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: CD Projekt Red) My main two hobbies are gaming and reading. My third hobby is turning those other two hobbies into homework. That is not sarcasm; I love managing wishlists, surfing recommendations, and visualizing my stats with sortable spreadsheets and colorful pie charts. With gaming it's easy. I dabble in spreadsheet logs occasionally, but I mainly lean on Steam to manage my gaming library and wishlist. Hobbyist reading apps, however, still leave a lot to be desired. Honestly, they could all learn a thing or twenty from Steam. Reading for fun, especially fiction, has been in a boom for the past five or so years. For some people it was a pandemic hobby. Others got indoctrinated by Booktok (the book side of TikTok) and still others were gripped by the rise of the romantasy subgenre. The chemical reaction of that many new nerds in a niche caused an explosion of companion apps. Latest Videos From PC Gamer Related Articles My new bedtime Steam Deck go-to is a cozy bookshop sim where everyone loves hearing my opinion 'Knowing Steam players are hoarders explains why you give Valve that 30%,' analyst tells devs: 'You get access to a bunch of drunken sailors who spend money irresponsibly' New Steam update adds new 'customise' tab your games—letting you finally organise things by release date, or just look at Big Naturals Withers every time you open Baldur's Gate 3 I've tried quite a few of them: the old faithful Goodreads that was basically the only option before all this fuss, stats-focused Storygraph, social media platform Fable, habit trackers Bookly and Bookmory, and others. The more upstart book apps I try, the more I think we as gamers don't realize just how good we've got it with Steam. I occasionally give Steam a hard time for its crowded interface and feature bloat. And inevitably everyone complains when the interface slightly changes. But I have genuinely enjoyed a lot of the new features we've gotten in the past ten years. I wish StoryGraph's multi-tag searching was as good as Steam's, but Goodreads doesn't allow it at all. (Image credit: Valve) The library redesign with dynamic collections totally changed how I browse my own digital shelf. The recommendations queue, though I don't often use it personally, is a genuinely good way to leverage heaps of data to put games in front of interested players. Heck, just using combinations of user-applied tags on games to deep search for my niches always works better than I'm expecting it to. Best-selling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson said a while back that book publishing has a lot to learn from gaming and that's true here too. The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Goodreads is the closest thing we have to 'Steam for readers.' It's a massive legacy database with a user-review focused platform owned by a huge digital distribution retailer (Amazon), with not enough competition in the space to incentivize it to improve its aging interface. It's even analogous to Steam in that the Kindle reading app, which Amazon also owns, is a launcher for all your digital products. The dashboard is bad enough but don't get me started on the personal library view. (Image credit: Goodreads) But Amazon doesn't make all those database entries and user reviews nearly as useful to readers as it could. I can click on a genre like "fantasy" but then that takes me to a big list of all new releases in that genre and lists that other random users have made of fantasy books. Why can't I filter by two tags at once, "fantasy" and "historical fiction" maybe? Why has it buried its book recommendation feature in a dropdown menu? Why does the main Goodreads dashboard center reading progress updates from other users as if this is primarily a social media platform? If Goodreads took even a couple pages out of Steam's playbook it'd be a big improvement. It could display my own current reads front and center while also promoting big new releases in my favorite genres, books by my own highly-rated authors that I've not read yet, and its recommendations tool. It could give me the power to actually browse and search all those many user-applied tags just the way Steam does. Seriously, just rip off Steam's dynamic collections feature for my library and I'd be happy. Instead Amazon invested in Goodreads this year by…changing its logo and almost nothing else. My kingdom for the dyanmic collections feature but for Goodreads shelves. (Image credit: Valve) Unlike Steam, Goodreads has a lot of competing apps cropping up around it looking to attract all these new readers. StoryGraph has a good grasp on stats visualizing and a recommendation algorithm, but the interface is so bare that it doesn't feel like a destination and is only the place I go to track my daily page count. Fable is way too much social media for me—we all have plenty of that already—and the others are too focused on creating a reading habit that I personally already have and don't need help gamifying, thanks. Steam has already stitched all these use cases together in a pretty ideal way. It's embraced the power of its database and given browsing power to players, and made a platform that feels like the real homepage for my gaming PC. The hobbyist readers of the post-pandemic boom are a stats-loving bunch, voracious for recommendations, and ways to manage our own libraries. We deserve a sleek app that feels like a real destination, not just a utility. We deserve Steam, but for books. Lauren Morton Social Links Navigation Lead SEO Editor Lauren has been writing for PC Gamer since she went hunting for the cryptid Dark Souls fashion police in 2017. She joined the PCG staff in 2021, now serving as self-appointed chief cozy games and farmlife sim enjoyer. Her career originally began in game development and she remains fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long fantasy books, longer RPGs, can't stop playing co-op survival crafting games, and has spent a number of hours she refuses to count building houses in The Sims games for over 20 years. You must confirm your public display name before commenting Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name. My new bedtime Steam Deck go-to is a cozy bookshop sim where everyone loves hearing my opinion 'Knowing Steam players are hoarders explains why you give Valve that 30%,' analyst tells devs: 'You get access to a bunch of drunken sailors who spend money irresponsibly' New Steam update adds new 'customise' tab your games—letting you finally organise things by release date, or just look at Big Naturals Withers every time you open Baldur's Gate 3 I've swapped modern live service games for a browser game that's been running since 2009 Steam's new store look is out and is earning a mixed response: 'Thanks Valve I am a grandma using Steam on a giant old touchscreen Samsung tablet' You probably have like $100 in Steam trading cards on all those games you've never played, and you can get it without ever actually launching them Latest in Games Silent Hill f's finicky combat doesn't actually have to be an issue if you follow these cardinal rules Every ending in Silent Hill f and how to get them Someone made the Metal Gear Solid 4 channel-surfing section into a game and it's absolutely perfect Diablo 4 is crossing the streams with Starcraft cosmetics, and honestly? A Terran marine makes a better Barbarian than I'd have expected In Falsus is the exact kind of mega-anime rhythm game I've been desperate for on PC Borderlands 4 weekly update and latest patch notes Latest in Features The more book tracking apps I try, the more I think we as gamers don't realize just how good we've got it with Steam Tiny Metal 2 is the third game in the turn-based strategy series, and it just so happens to be taking after my favorite Advance Wars Baby Steps is funny, but it's also a depressing, confrontational horror game about thwarted modern masculinity An obscure RPG's moral dilemma about the 'ethical' human meat alternative propping up a zombie society is one of the best side quests I've ever played, and Steam achievements show only 13% of its players have even seen it So far, the Battlefield 6 campaign is satisfied being a Call of Duty cover band Yakuza Kiwami 3 is beautiful and ridiculous, and I'm finally going to actually finish the game this time HARDWARE BUYING GUIDES LATEST GAME REVIEWS Best gaming laptop in 2025: I've had my hands on the best laptops for gaming of this generation and these are the ones I recommend Best SSD for gaming in 2025: the fastest and the best value solid state drives to perk up your PC Best Hall effect keyboards in 2025: the fastest, most customizable keyboards for competitive gaming Best PCIe 5.0 SSD for gaming in 2025: the only Gen 5 drives I will allow in my PC Best graphics cards in 2025: I've tested pretty much every AMD and Nvidia GPU of the past 20 years and these are today's top cards Corsair Sabre V2 Pro Ultralight Wireless gaming mouse review Glorious Model O3 Wireless review Hades 2 review Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles review Baby Steps review PC Gamer is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site. Contact Future's experts Terms and conditions Privacy policy Cookies policy Advertise with us Accessibility Statement Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885. Please login or signup to comment Please wait...
